Editor’s note: Guest blogger The Christian Left (a consortium of Progressive Christian writers and thinkers whose web page recently went live) submits the following article on biblical examples for mixing church and state. Both the Old and New Testaments stress the importance of government for protection and for maintaining order. In the Bible, kings or other rulers were expected to rule with wisdom and justice. The Old Testament contains story after story of wicked, greedy and oppressive rulers who brought disaster... Read more

Editor’s note: Please welcome our first guest blogger: Janet Conrad.  She’s the author of the blog “Nuggets n Bits” and the admin for Facebook’s Christians Tired of Being Misrepresented page. If you aren’t familiar with her FB page, I strongly encourage you to check it out! Washing someone’s feet in bible times was like cleaning someone else’s toilet in modern times.  What would you do if you knew that the President was coming to your home to clean your toilet? ... Read more

I’ve been bothered, and I suppose curious, for awhile about people who claim to be Christian and yet passionately carry around signs like this: And look, she’s smiling.  God loves a joyful hater…or something like that.  It’s almost as if they can’t be bothered with the actual words of Jesus.  You know, pesky little sayings that get in the way of genuine American hatred.  Things like, “Love your neighbor as yourself” and “Let him who is without sin cast the... Read more

In many ways, this blog page is my response to what I see as a general malaise that has fallen across  Christianity in the U.S.  We have bought so far into a kumbaya, turn the other cheek, Jesus is more of a doormat than a door theology,  that we have rendered ourselves ineffectual.  We think that being nice and kind and loving to one another means not making anyone upset and being non-confrontational.  Worse yet, we have started measuring our... Read more

  For me ‘Left Behind’ has become much more than a book.  Much like ‘Tea Party’ has colloquially become a descriptive for a particular archetype of a group of people, Left Behind has become the same for me. Recognizing that I am working with generalities here and that generalities always do a disservice to some people who identify with the group, for me ‘Left Behind’ has come to describe a particular type of church goer. (I use ‘church goer’ here... Read more

  2 Timothy 4:3-4 3For the time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires, 4and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths. We have wandered – drifted if you will.  We, the Church, have drifted away from the sound doctrine of the One who came to show us that love has no bounds.  There are... Read more

  I meet monthly with a group of ministers to discuss the current state of The Church and possible paths forward. We guide our discussions by working our way through books that do much the same thing.  I suppose our hope is that the people who write these books will have much more experience in helping churches gain new life than any one of us individually might have and thus give us much needed guidance in doing the same for... Read more

  “He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness,and to walk humbly with your God?” Micah 6:8 Today, Oct. 11, is National Coming Out Day.  The fact that we even have to have this day is a sad statement about how committed we are as the Body of Christ to justice and to equality.  It is also a sad statement about the hate... Read more